The Shiftworking Husband Approach To Freezer Cooking

These gals have got a lot to answer for: Kate, Joy and Toni. The three of them have been in cahoots for the last 18 or so days to produce this:



This is bad. Very bad. Because it has inspired me to do this:

Three Week Freezer Cooking Plan (well, the preamble a least!)

The Background Info

Talented Hubby works a three week rotating roster. Other attempts at OAMC/freezer cooking have failed, I think, partly because I have always just kind of made my own plan and expected everything else to fit in around it. This time around, I’ve decided to see if using the ‘building blocks’ of TH’s schedule will help with the planning and execution.

How It Will Work

One day for cooking? Pffft. I need several - I’ve learned that the hard way. So of TH’s 3 week roster, one week - his afternoon shift - will be put aside to do several mini sessions. I had a good, long think about this one. The more I try to do in one day, the faster/easier I tend to crack under the pressure. I need to get rid of my OCD-ness on this. I loosely threw together a list of meals/recipes I regularly make which either freeze well in their entirety or in part. I separated them into four categories - Beef, Chicken, Misc Mains and Baking & Side Dishes. Here’s how the week will pan out:

• Saturday/Sunday - The Planning Phase (grocery store circulars, select meals, pantry and freezer inventories, writing up a ‘game plan’ for the week)
• Day 1 (Monday) - Butcher, F&V shop, grocery store (morning), prep work including thawing, chopping, dragging out the appliances etc (afternoon)
• Day 2 (Tuesday) - Beef
• Day 3 (Wednesday) - Chicken
• Day 4 (Thursday) - Misc Mains
• Day 5 (Friday) - Baking & Side Dishes

Remember, in a three week timeframe I only need to plan for 21 dinners - 20 homemade and 1 takeout (baby steps people!) This - at least at first - means I don’t have to cook six meatloaves or a quadruple batch of chicken casserole. You could quite easily just choose ten recipes and double each of them. On Beef Day, for example, I may only have some beef mince (ground beef)to brown, a lasagna to make, a stew to put in the crockpot overnight and some spaghetti sauce to throw together. This keeps it manageable. And because it’s not a dawn-to-dusk approach I can fit it all in while the kids are at school and probably be all done cooking after a couple of hours, depending on the dish.

The Benefits

Three weeks instead of the traditional four weeks/one month kind of plan means less meals to plan for, less ingredients to buy at one time and honestly? Less hassle.

I can also accurately and predictably plan out the sessions for shopping, prep work and cooking during times that best suit TH and our family in general. For example, I like to drag the moaning and groaning wildly enthusiastic man to the butcher and fruit & veg shop on shopping day. Looking at his 3 week roster I can see which day would be best for this. Since I want to take a full week to get up to speed and maximise ’sans children’ cooking time, this means a Monday to Friday stretch. The other alternatives are his week of dayshift (no help with the grocery shopping) or his week off (where we plan other errands). The week of afternoon shift suits us best. If Talented Hubby worked the same shift every day, or a two or four week roster, then we’d work around that as well.

Ideally, I’d like to work at minimising ‘extra’ grocery trips in between big shopping/cooking weeks. The shorter the timeframe, the easier it is to manage this at first :) And as an added bonus, if we only ever had to shop every three weeks, we’re going to save bucketloads of money by default.

The Budget

Now, before anyone freaks out at my figures, you have to understand Aussie prices aren’t going to match up with the kinds of figures I keep finding from American (or elsewhere)bloggers. All you really need to know is that we were (are) regularly spending upwards of $1000 per month on groceries at the moment. I know, scary. Anything would be an improvement. Now, a few qualifiers - we feed two adults and three children (aged 6, 7 and 9) and this figure also includes all paper products,toiletries, and other small household items like batteries, stamps and so on. I have no idea what the ‘food only’ portion amounts to and it seems like a lot of work to figure that out, LOL, so I’m going to keep it ‘all inclusive’. Keep this in mind as you follow along with our progress. My aim with this first ‘Three Week Plan’ attempt is to spend $600 or less (and as I said, this includes everything). This equates to $800 per month/$200 per week which is a significant first goal, I think.

Second, if you’re reading from overseas - couponing for groceries virtually doesn’t exist down here. Coupons that do pass through our house are for things like takeout pizza, oil changes or carpet cleaning. Similarly, we do not have warehouse clubs (well, none that I’m aware of, and certainly none in my state though my eastern state counterparts could chime in with what happens where they are)OR anything remotely resembling those CVS deals I keep reading about all over Bloggityville. Waaah! We do have some Aldi, though again, none in my state. If I want to save money on groceries, it pretty much boils down to shopping the loss leaders from the weekly circulars, good menu planning, good cooking practices (padding out the freezer, using up leftovers and so on) and using a Price Book (which I’m currently developing). Trust me, I’d love to feed the family for under $50 per week but it just ain’t gonna happen!

Of course, that $600 budget for the three week period can easily be adjusted down for the following cycle - it was made generous on purpose to allow for ‘wriggle room’. Here’s how the budget will be broken up (these are rough ‘off the top of my head’ figures and are a guide only - what matters more is the overall three-week total):

• $120 for meat
• $75 for fruit and veg
• $75 for dairy ($40 of that will probably be in milk alone)
• $50 for a Grocery Slush Fund
• $50 for a family takeout meal
• which leaves $230 for other groceries (which, once you take meat, f&v and dairy out, will be plenty)

Any leftover cash after Big Shopping Day gets thrown in a baggie (minus the $50 Grocery Slush Fund which gets its own baggie). All subsequent grocery spending/takeout comes out of this baggie. A tally for each category will probably go up on the blog somewhere or if not, somewhere on notepaper.

The Grocery Slush Fund

I’ve done this for-evah. Each time I went shopping I’d peel off $20 (I shopped fortnightly, so that’s $10 per week) and put it aside, letting that slush fund build up to a healthy amount which was then dipped into as needed when I wanted to buy multiples of a really good deal that I might not have ordinarily been able to absorb back into weekly grocery spending (like $45 worth of washing powder on incredible deal - you might not need it that week but know you’ll need to buy it eventually). The idea is to keep a ‘float’ of money - mine was $100 - and just top it up as you spend it. For some reason though, I almost always managed to get plenty of the sale items within the regular weekly budget so every now and then we’d purposely shave $50 off and put it toward a bill or a fun item. During The Height of the Grocery Slush Fund (when we were saving for a deposit on a house and did some of our best money saving - sigh) we didn’t plan for takeout so if we had extra in the GSF or just leftover from the weekly budget, this is how we paid for it. No leftover money, no takeout.

The Recipes

I’m still compiling my list of meals, but I’m not doing anything fancy. They’d probably be meals I’d make on the night anyway - lasagna, casseroles, etc. Some of these recipes aren’t even really freezer cooking at all - merely packaging together to make meal prep easier (such as browning the ground beef then storing that with a package of stirfry vegetables and some noodles - a no brainer really). Twenty meals will build up in a flash! Another thing to consider when working around a shiftworking spouse (and kids) is personal tastes. For example, I know the week of Talented Hubby’s afternoon shift (which incidentally, is also Cooking Week) I try to concentrate on dinners that are fast, simple and kid-friendly. We save the more elaborate roasts and casseroles for times when Daddy is home. Of course, with all the cooking during that week, easy dinners are going to be very much welcomed, LOL.

Talented Hubby just came off afternoon shift so I have most of May to finalise this little plan of mine. Big Shopping Day (and thereafter, Cooking Week) is on the cards for June 2nd. In the meantime, I’m totally going to cheat and pick up some loss leaders to sock away if I know I’ll use them for the recipes on my shortlist, LOL. I still want the monthly total to be an accurate reflection though, so I won’t go overboard. Wish me luck!